IT4Innovations will have a new Director

Vít Vondrák has been involved with IT4Innovations since its beginning. He was part of the team that prepared the project ‘Center of Excellence IT4Innovations’, funded by the Operational Programme Science, Research and Innovation. Thanks to this project, a large national e-Infrastructure, IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, was built. Subsequently, Vít Vondrák served as the head of the research programme, and was later appointed the scientific director. At the same time, he represents the Czech Republic on the Council of the Pan-
European Research Infrastructure Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE).

The strategic task ahead of the new director is to ensure the continuation and upgrade of existing computing systems, thus ensuring the Czech research community's access to state-of-the-art computing technologies in the future. He also wants to focus on the systematic building of cooperation with other research institutions and, in particular, on closer cooperation with industrial partners. For the research activities of IT4Innovations, he will define and strengthen new research directions in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC) and High
Performance Data Analysis (HPDA). The centre's personnel policy is equally important, as there is very strong competition in ICT and the demand for skilled IT professionals is high. "I consider our employees to be a very important factor that helps us to be a successful centre and also to remain competitive across Europe. Without highly qualified HPC and HPDA specialists, we would not be able to excel in the community of top European supercomputer centres, "adds Vondrák.

About Vít Vondrák

Doc. Mgr. Vít Vondrák, Ph.D. has been working at VŠB-Technical University of Ostrava since 1993, where he spent the longest period at the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and obtained the title of Associate Professor in 2007. His professional focus is numerical linear algebra, optimization methods, and high performance computing. Between 1997 and 2007 he spent several years researching abroad. He spent 2 years at Aalborg University in Denmark, and in 2004 and 2006 he spent time at two prestigious American univesities, the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Stanford University in California.

During his scientific career, he has led or participated in the management of a number of research projects. Among the most prominent are the EU's 7th Framework Programme projects (PRACE-1IP, PRACE-2IP, PRACE-3IP and HARPA), EU Horizon 2020 projects (PRACE-4IP, PRACE-5IP), InnoHPC The Interreg programme, the CzeBaCCA project for co-operation between the Czech Republic and Bavaria in the field of supercomputing applications, and the project of large infrastructure of the Czech Republic. He is also the principal investigator of the Intel Parallel Computing Centre at IT4Innovations, and co-coordinator of the Urban TEP project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA).

IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center provides state-of-the-artsupercomputer technologies and services to both Czech and international research teams from academia and industry. Currently, IT4Innovations runs two supercomputers - Anselm (installed in the summer of 2013) and Salomon (installed in the summer of 2015). IT4Innovations is also a research centre with strong international links. The core topics of IT4Innovations research are advanced data analysis, developing parallel scalable algorithms, solving challenging engineering tasks, and modelling for nanotechnology.